…This,
reflecting perhaps my unchanging enjoyment of Dylan Thomas, was the title of
the very first editorial I ever wrote, 18 years ago, as the newly appointed
editor of the equally new British Journal
of Chiropractic (http://tiny.cc/gillox), which congratulated the
profession within the UK for its commonality of educational and professional
aims and standards and welcomed the immanent arrival of the General
Chiropractic Council with chiropractic taking its place in the pantheon of
regulated healthcare professions!
Ironically,
the theme for my first professional blog is taken from the very last editorial
I wrote. By then, the journal had become
international under its new identity Clinical
Chiropractic and my ‘Fond Farewell’ took a few well-aimed swipes both at
chiropractic bloggers, and the profession’s self-appointed, mostly unqualified
detractors (http://tiny.cc/nvllox) who unsurprisingly feed
gleefully off the rabid, misspelt ravings of the few in order to give credence
to their own prejudicial misconceptions.
“Thou
shalt not blog” was my first commandment for the Chiropractic post-2012 and yet
here I am, two years later, asking colleagues to do as I say, rather than as I
do. There are, however, reasons for this
apparent hypocrisy, most of which boil down to wanting to expand the
information already available of our website to provide rolling, easily updated
patient-centred resources and educational health tools in a medium that integrates with our existing
social media platforms … in other words, I want to help patients and promote my
clinics, which, after all, is how we all actually make our living.
I
am not, however, so blind to my own peccadilloes that I can’t spot the smidgen
of arrogance that makes me believe I can blog professionally enough to rise
above the errors that I can so easily spot in others. I do however, feel that I may by now have
earned that right: I have written since the age of six, when I launched a
hand-written and drawn comic called Everyone’s
Bounce – it featured a frog as it’s lead character – price 3d (yes, d
not p); I have done so professionally since the age of 16 when I found myself
working for a local paper and freelancing for national ones. I have written text books; articles and
editorials for peer-reviewed and professional journals; a novel (bar the last chapter-and-a-half); a
research thesis; press releases and the content for 17 social media
platforms. At the last estimate, this
was something around 12 million words … I have served my apprenticeship!
If
I want to blog, blog I shall.
The
best antidote to bigotry and ignorance is reason and education; persistence and
patience.
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